Antoine de Saint-Exupery Quotes
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And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, 'Yes, the stars always make me laugh!' And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you.
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What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.
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The time for action is now. It's never too late to do something.
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Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures-in this century as in others our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together.
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It is in the compelling zest of high adventure and of victory, and in creative action, that man finds his supreme joys.
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I don't believe you! Flowers are weak creatures. They are naive. They reassure themselves as best they can. They believe that their thorns are terrible weapons.
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One must observe the proper rites.
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If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
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A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but justifying themselves as paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance.
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Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the asronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.
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Behind all seen things lies something vaster; everything is but a path, a portal or a window opening on something other than iteself.
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"It's a question of discipline," the little prince told me later on. "When you've finished washing and dressing each morning, you must tend your planet."
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When one wishes to play the wit, he sometimes wander a little from the truth.
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Grown ups are certainly very strange.
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The tender friendships one gives up, on parting, leave their bite on the heart, but also a curious feeling of a treasure somewhere buried.
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The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.
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Attitude is a paintbrush. It colors everything!
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Loneliness is bred of a mind that has grown earth-bound.
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Love, like a carefully loaded ship, crosses the gulf between the generations.
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For true love is inexhaustible; the more you give, the more you have. And if you go to draw at the true fountainhead, the more water you draw, the more abundant is its flow.
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All men have the stars," he answered, "but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travellers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems. For my businessman they were wealth. But all the stars are silent. You--you alone--will have the stars as no one else has them.
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The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them.
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And that heart which was a wild garden was given to him who only loved trim lawns. And the imbecile carried the princess into slavery.
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And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.